IRAN ON THE BRINK: The goal of the Islamic regime in Teheran has been to exclude the Western press and hope that “out of sight, out of mind,” will enable it to crush the growing rebellion against the dictatorship. First, it is working, as Obama and company are too busy playing golf to pay attention. Second, it is unnecessary, because the idiot press (even the Wall Street Journal) is more worried about the impact the demonstrations will have on Ahmadinejad’s reaction to sanctions over the nuclear program than on whether or not he is about to literally lose his head. Make no mistake; what is happening in Iran today is unprecedented -- and will end with a regime change that will shake the world. And you can bet Obama will take credit for never having seen it coming.

By Dennis Mullin

The world has so far basically yawned. The administration has cast aside its near endless reticence and finally denounced the crackdown. President Obama condemned the Teheran regime’s “iron fist of brutality” and the “violent and unjust suppression of innocent Iranian citizens. What is talking place within Iran is...about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice,” he added, racing toward the golf course.

France deplored the “arbitrary arrests and violence carried out against ordinary protesters.” Germany, Italy, Austria, Canada and Norway issued similar statements. Even Russia, which has close ties to Iran, urged restraint and compromise. The only thing missing from this charade, is Venezuela’s Chavez to send in his troops to save the Islamic Republic from the “sulfur” smell of the devil in the White House.

UNREPENTANT: The only true divine government (besides Obama’s) appeared unrepentant. The Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia announced that they were “fully prepared, if necessary, to eradicate the plot (against the regime) and urge the judiciary to react firmly, without any restriction, against the plotters.”

Keep in mind, that this is not a bunch of loony Jihadists we are dealing with here. These are the descendants of the great Persian Empire. Wikipedia says: “At the height of its power, the empire encompassed approximately 8 million km. The empire was forged by Cyrus the Great, and spanned three continents, including territories of Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of Central Asia, Asia Minor, Thrace, much of the Black Sea coastal regions, Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, and all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya.”

HISTORICAL GIANT: “It is noted in western history as the foe of the Greek city states during the Greco-Persian Wars, for freeing the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and for instituting Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ) as the empire's official language. It was invaded and conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE.”

It is also a safe bet that not one person in Obama’s White House knows those facts, as they are too immersed in the study of ACORN’s history to care about the real world.

Throughout history, the model of the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great has been cited for its very successful centralized administrative structure and efficient governmental procedures. Cyrus and his successors Darius and Xerxes were renowned for allowing all conquered cultures to maintain their own laws, customs and leadership.

BACKGROUND: Despite the 1979 revolution against the Shah, Persia does not have a lengthy history of political upheaval and its Shiite background does not follow a lengthy history of Islamic historical religious radicalism. As the pre-Islamic home of Zoroastrianism, it did repeatedly try to conquer the known world. But before Khomeini and company came along Jews prospered in Iran. Saudi Arabia still forbids Christians to even gather in religious ceremonies -- that has never been the case in Iran.

All that being said – here we are with an Islamic Republic run by old mullahs and driven by military men and mad scientists who dream of a becoming a nuclear power. What they would do with nuclear weapons remains unclear, just as it still does for Indian and Pakistani generals. They are so close together they cannot bomb one another without committing suicide. Bombing Israel would also result in instant retaliation of such disproportionate magnitude as to put the concept of a Pyrrhic victory to shame.

Iran is now a nation in which 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30. All have relatives and contacts abroad-- most are extremely electronically literate. Even the mullahs were forced to allow the series “Lost,” on national TV, because so many Moslem “zealots” were watching it on satellite dishes. Unemployment is near 25 percent, so the youngsters have plenty of time to spend online -- and none of them even remembers the Shah or his relatively peaceful demise.

PRECENDENTS: As a correspondent who attended the departure of the Shah in 1979 and the arrival of Khomeini and his revolution, I have many important impressions of that time which may still be relevant in shedding some light on what to expect to happen in the near future.

First, the Shah essentially abdicated. He ordered his troops to stand down and left the country, rather than to resort to bloodshed in the streets. Nobody ever was forced to openly confront soldiers and the demonstrations remained largely peaceful right up to the time he walked up the steps of his airplane and vanished into exile.

FRENCH SUPPORT: Second, Khomeini was operating – with full French government support – as a virtual government in exile. From his headquarters in Paris, a team of Western educated technocrats assembled around the old, virtually senile cleric, and put all the pieces into place with the help of French intelligence. When they stepped off their Air France flight in Teheran, everything was in place right down to the press releases, as France expected to replace the U.S. in neo-colonial grandeur.

The smooth transition lasted about two days. The morning after Khomeini’s return, the entire military establishment including the Imperial Guard “Invincibles,” of Thermopylae fame, presented themselves to declare loyalty to the Ayatollah. One by one, I watched the generals be interviewed live on television as they pledged their loyalty to the new order. The next morning, one by one, they were all hanged dead by the Revolutionary Guard, also on the same national TV program.

SAVAK: Within hours, the dreaded SAVAK secret police which had so ruthlessly supported the Shah, changed its name and went straight to work for the clerics. One by one, the emerging mullah power-structure took control of all the ministries and one by one, the technocrats that accompanied Khomeini from Paris were purged and executed.

Within weeks, Iran was a dictatorship for more frightening than what the Shah had left behind. Thirty years later the scenario is somewhat different. There is no regime in exile, for one thing, and no central opposition figure of any distinction. From the tenor of the online conversation and the street protests, there is no mullah at all in the future vision of these revolutionaries. They appear to want a modern, secular, participatory democracy.

The good news is that in the absence of any organized opposition, people don’t have to fear retaliation in the same manner as in the days after the Shah. No generals need to fear hanging, and no mullahs need to fear the loss of their prayer rug. The holdouts with the most to lose are the Revolutionary Guards, but they certainly already have Swiss bank accounts and apartments in Paris already in place.

NO STATUS QUO: The issue then is the tipping point; when somebody, probably in the military, realizes that the status quo simply won’t hold. It is astonishing to see crowds battling riot forces and burning police motorcycles. This is no small event in a theocratic dictatorship – it involves the rejection of not only your priest, but your King at the same time. This is not casual rioting in Persian terms, it is full-scale insurrection. And coming on the high holy days, this is not something any regime will easily survive.

Somewhere tonight there is a general, who is watching the riots, listening to a police radio, and just saw his daughter’s roommate beaten by a Revolutionary Guard -- and has called a meeting of the general staff for the weekend.

Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning to hear that there has been a coup in Iran, with a general promising that a temporary, care-taker army control has been imposed, which will promise open, free elections within six months. The military will then pledge that on receipt of a UN pact on the right to develop peaceful nuclear power, inspections will be allowed in exchange for an immediate end to all economic sanctions, and normalized trade with all countries.

POSTCRIPT: Obama will say he arranged it all by closing Guantanamo; Nancy Pelosi will say she once winked at that general at a UN function; the press will be heartbroken that one of its favorite mullahs didn’t win the power struggle, but will still claim victory because of its editorial restraint; and Al Gore will say he invented Persia in the first place in a former life, and just couldn’t find it because of the fog in his mind that is caused by global warming.

The winners will be in Iran, which as a free Shiite real republic, will ally with the same model which is emerging in Iraq, and for the first time in centuries start creating the rebirth of Persian influence – based on sound administration, rule of law, advanced science and the ability to live with other cultures.

PERSIAN PROVERBS: “Once I had the strength but no wisdom, now I have the wisdom but no strength. Use your enemy's hand to catch a snake. A stone thrown at the right time is better than gold given at the wrong time. Risk - If one has to jump a stream and knows how wide it is, he will not jump. If he doesn't know how wide it is, he'll jump and six times out of ten he'll make it.” And,  perhaps, most frightening for the mullahs: “If the teacher is corrupt, the world will be corrupt. I murmured because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” Somebody is going to lose this revolution; and it will not take long, and will not be pretty, one way or the other. But most everyone will be able to claim victory, and say they were right all along.